A Large 3D Swept-Volume Video Display

The demand and applications for three-dimensional (3D) display systems is rapidly increasing. Many innovative, truly 3D display technologies have recently been developed, particularly those in the category of volumetric displays. However, currently no large format displays can produce true 3D images. They are either two-dimensional (2D) displays and represent the third dimension using well known techniques of shading and shadowing, or they are not full parallax displays and require the viewer to wear special head gear. There are many applications for large, truly 3D displays including billboards, kiosks, theaters, medicine, radar imaging, military and entertainment. To meet these growing applications, we introduce a large swept-volume display (LSVD) that is capable of displaying full-motion 3D video. The LSVD is comprised of several rotating panels; each rotating panel contains several image panes, and each image pane contains a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) that controls light-emitting diodes (LEDs). The rotating panels fill the volume of a cylinder that makes up a column of the display. The derivation of parameters for the arrangement of columns and the overlapping regions between the columns is also presented. In addition, an image partitioning algorithm that partitions the full image into the LSVD columns is provided along with the original circuit designs of a rendering algorithm for providing real-time, full-motion 3D video for SVDs.

I. Introduction

Today, most volumetric displays—those that fill a volume with a 3D image—can display only static 3D images. Furthermore, all existing 3D volumetric displays are relatively small. While large 3D displays could be used for many innovative purposes, including medical and radar imaging, advertising, and entertainment, typically, the design of volumetric displays is not scalable to very large sizes. In particular, the size of swept-volume displays (SVDs) is limited by both mechanical and image rendering constraints. This paper presents a novel approach for building 3D SVDs that overcomes these constraints enabling displays to be much larger than those that can be built using current SVD technologies.